Building a new computer
need some tech help

So my friend is building a new computer, and I helped him put it together. The bios screen boots up fine, but it takes a while to turn on. The hard drive also beeps a ton before anything comes on. The RAM and Power supply are fine, so I'm guessing the problem is in one of three places. Bios is set up wrong, Hard Drive is bad, or motherboard is bad. The motherboard is a foxconn (http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813186205), and the hard drive is a 500 gig seagate. He's using the onboard video card currently. Whenever I try to boot windows, it does a blue screen. I tried to run just Ubuntu from the disk, and it gives me a bunch of garbage after I click on run from disk. Any suggestions at all?

How exactly do you know the RAM and power supply are fine? Did you try them in another system? RAM is generally able to cause problems like this, although not necessarily consistently.
It's generally pretty hard to screw up motherboard bios just for the purpose of installing an operating system.

You didn't actually mention anything about installing though, so what's the story there? If Ubuntu fails to boot from a disk that already had the operating system on it, all kinds of system specific configuration could be screwed up, probably the most popular one of which being X. And to the uninitiated, failure messages related to that could easily be considered garbage. And don't even get me started on just trying to load Windows from anything other than the machine you originally installed it on.

Tried ram in my computer and it was fine, and I also have a power supply tester. Its 650 watts so it should be more than enough...although there is a switch on the supply that changes some sort of voltage, but I can't remember. Ill check next time I'm there..I can also take screen shots of the error message. I get a master drive sata 3 error, and when I put the harddrive in slot 3, it says slave instead of master.

You didn't answer my main question. Are you installing the operating system fresh in each case or are you just trying to boot from an operating system that was already installed on the drive?

EDIT: I wasn't even aware SATA did the whole master/slave thing. I guess you could try figuring out which SATA port the hard drive was in and try and move it to the first.
I've never actually had to deal with jumper configurations, but if you see something like in this image...http://www.google.co...s:0&tx=99&ty=52

You might need to figure out where the jumper needs to be in order to keep it from forcing some kind of slave mode.

This post has been edited by DimensionWarped: 17 January 2012 - 04:32 AM

You didn't answer my main question. Are you installing the operating system fresh in each case or are you just trying to boot from an operating system that was already installed on the drive?

EDIT: I wasn't even aware SATA did the whole master/slave thing. I guess you could try figuring out which SATA port the hard drive was in and try and move it to the first.
I've never actually had to deal with jumper configurations, but if you see something like in this image...http://www.google.co...s:0&tx=99&ty=52

You might need to figure out where the jumper needs to be in order to keep it from forcing some kind of slave mode.

Whoops, didn't even see that. Everything is brand new, nothing has been installed ever. It was freshly built. From my understanding, I didn't think SATA was capable of master and slave? Guess I was wrong?

Even though the RAM worked in another computer, I would still suggest letting memtest run to completion. I used to get that exact same BSOD regularly, until I replaced my 2GB stick of ram with another, then it went away, Memory issues tend to be extremely unstable, and like you, a second computer booted fine with the "bad stick" but still failed memtest.

There's what Windows 7 disk does. A Ubuntu disk gives me similar garbage, but more of it.

I understand usually this is because of hardware conflicts and what not, but I've never seen it happen when there is litterally nothing in the computer besides the onboard video card, one stick of memory, a disk drive, and a brand new never used hard drive (which this screen also happens when the hard drive is not present).

I swapped the RAM around and reset the BIOS, that did the trick. Now we're having the problem of the HDMI cable making the picture look like shit. It's as if the saturation bar was moved to max... :\

Have you installed the drivers for your monitor yet? I was using a CRT with my PC until I bought an HD LCD. The LCD looked like shit. I installed the drivers provided with the monitor, it gave me extra controls and resolution settings. My monitor now looks great.